Posts Tagged Amber tanks things with her face

My priest is now solidly geared, with more pieces of tier than my main (probably because I keep giving away tokens to guildies for their 4 piece….). I am still working on Lyrandre because her DPS shoulders and chest still have to go, but the bulk of my alt-obsession has refocused on my druid.

Poor Aedeminar. She was rolled in vanilla and never got anywhere, really. I can conquor my hatred of questing by tackling the LFD though!
…yeah. We all know what my leveling LFD life is like, don’t we?

There is a REASON she is tank and resto specced. It’s because when she hit Wrath content and Utgarde vomited up all the Tanks Who Were Not Tanks, I said AAAAAAAH FUCKING CUMGUZZLING WHORES and started tanking.

Well, I hit that point again the other day, after healing a couple of really special cookies. So I queued as tank and got Halls of Stone.

Auuugh, but okay. I was pulling cautiously because, come on, it has been a LONG TIME since I have tanked on Mina–at least a year. Shit CHANGED, yo, and I have hardly any idea what I’m doing. At some point, however, I observed that someone was running ahead, grabbing additional mobs, and dragging them back to me.

Hey! Hey, mother fucker, that’s rude! I don’t know if I’m prepared for that shit! Of course the obvious answer is to LET THE IDIOT DIE, but wait.
Wait.

When I saw who was doing it, I was shocked. IT WAS THE HEALER. THE MOTHER FUCKING PRIEST HEALER.

WHY DO YOU BETRAY ME SO, HEALER? ARE WE NOT KINDRED? DO WE NOT KNOW HOW FUCKING ANNOYING IT IS WHEN SOMEONE DOES THAT BECAUSE THE TANK CAN MISS SOME AND THEN THEY ARE BEATING ON YOU AND OH GOD WHY.

WHY. I CAN’T EVEN LET YOU DIE OUT OF REVENGE, FUUUCK.

And then I saw him using mind sear on single targets and I was just like dear lord, there is just no winning this.

I made a mistake last night. Our second 10 man folded due to a last minute cancellation, and the new priest wanted to run heroics, so I thought I would offer to go with. I needed a few more VP for another piece of gear, anyway. So. Another guildie who is also new to the guild was tagging along as well, which would put us at a healer and 2 DPS. Eeeenh. Surely I can tank a Zulroic with 2 pugs and not want to shank people!

No. Absolutely not.

I have not run the 5 man ZA and ZG much at all. In fact, I’d say I’ve MAYBE done them each twice, and none of that was terribly recent. I tanked one of them once, but I don’t even remember which one it WAS, so my familiarity is…lacking.

And I’m not a very confident tank. I function fine as a raid tank for my guild, where I know the people and I know the fights. Throw me into an instance that I don’t know very well–where, in fact, I have old memories of tanking it when it was a raid layered over everything–and I slow down a bit, and flail a bit more.

I was, apparently, not fast enough for the pug hunter. Now, I was already head scratching at this hunter because he kept tossing down frost traps. Not the ice cube making trap of helpful CCness. Not the fire trap of more damageness. Not even the snake trap of LOLSNAKESness. No, no he was throwing the frost trap down…on trash that did NOT contain scouts…for no apparent reason. Now, I got my hunter to 85 and then proceeded to not do much with her, but I don’t recall that suddenly becoming useful.

And then he started the GO GO GO nonsense. I paused and told him, politely, that I was not a tank that liked to be rushed. He then proceeded to ANGRILY AND IN CAPS yell at me when I did not move the next boss fast enough (see: lack of familiarity with fights). I became less polite at this point, telling him to chill or to go back to enjoying long ass DPS queues because no one likes to tank for assholes. Later on in the instance, after a pull went…less than well, he told me he sucked and left.

…thanks!

I’m now back to never tanking for a heroic group containing any pugs at all. I’ll go sit in my long ass DPS queue.

Then, from the tanking part of my brain that includes not only my decently geared DK but also my undergeared tank alts: OH THANK GOD.

For one thing–hi. My name is Amber and I currently play a Frost/Blood DK. Frost has become something of a proc machine lately. I can have more Killing Machine procced almost constantly in some cases, and while delicious for my DPS it has caused me to face tank–in raids, with well geared and skilled tanks–more than once. Or if not face tanking then I stand there and pet my cat while auto attacking, and that’s no fun for anyone but Vesta.

Have I mentioned that I have no threat drop? Because um, I have no threat drop. I don’t even have something like feint or cower. Just death, of the non-feigned time.

Also, have you EVER tried to level up a tank alt in pugged heroics well into the expansion? Have you? If my DK is yanking threat off well geared tanks in Zulroics I can only imagine what I’d do to someone less geared than me. Actually, I don’t have to imgaine, I remember clearly from the last time I leveled an alt tank. It sucks.

I’m not worried about tanking being dumbed down. You’ve seen raid encounters lately, right? Pray tell, where do you see a tank and spank fight? Nowhere? Okay then.

And last but not least, back to that thing about being a DK tank. I’m too busy mashing buttons trying to STAY ALIVE to worry about silly little things like THREAT.

It’s always been a theme that if there’s an alt I’m interested in, the guild will promptly fill up with that just class/roll. At one point BoO had few hunters and many priests, so I started to get my hunter up to speed…

…and then we had a bunch of hunters, so she went back in her box.

And then we were shy tanks some times, so I tried bringing Ambrosine up to speed, and then…we had many tanks!

That’s happened twice, actually, to my bemusement.

Regardless, I’ve vaguely wanted to tank and been mostly unable to for one reason or another (can’t justify an alt tank with 4 main spec tanks now can I?). Last night, however, things changed. I was TANKING! We down Marrowgar and I’m handing out loot and…

…the severs went down.

And stayed down.

The fact that I was tanking brought about such a disturbance in the Force universe that is must have disrupted one of the Chicago data centers! For greater irony my primary servers are in Ruin AND Vindication, so I lost BOTH of them!

While checking the forum thread for info, I made sure to post helpful commentary.

I’m going to quote liberally from Tam’s post here. I think Tam said it all better than I can to begin with, but I’m going to chime in anyway. Because I have nothing else good to post. :P

I’m not putting on my Dumbing It Down For the Casuals hat, or getting elitist about the virtues of things being hard, but overgearing everything – as one currently does what with heirlooms and the ability shift associated with tacking 20 more levels onto the end of a game – does make you incredibly complacent. …The sad thing is, I suspect I could get quite a long way without really knowing all that much about tanking.

The other day I remember thinking a tank was rather squishy, inspected him at the end of the run and realised he was nowhere near def-cap and wearing just about the worst itemized set of ungemmed blues and purples I had ever seen. I know skill is not about gear but wearing the right gear, even if it’s not the best gear, is some kind of indicator.

…Heirlooms compensate a bit at this level but I have no idea from what dank hole of ineptitude the average pre-80 Northrend tank has crawled. And it’s all such banal failure as well – stupid things like massively over-pulling, not controlling the mobs at all, getting knocked back into other mobs, pulling when I’m on a mana break. I resent these wipes because they’re completely unnecessary.

The difference is, I suppose, that nobody is geared enough to compensate, so we’re expected to play like we know what the hell we’re doing. And I can’t work out if it’s laziness, a genuine failure to adapt from running heroics at 80 in ICC gear, or the fact that nobody has really had to learn how to do their bloody job because they could previously rely on rolling over stuff with heirlooms and AoE!lol.

That’s it, in a nutshell. That is why I am not healing pugs on my druid right now. I step into a pug and am effectively slapped in the face with failure more often than not, from tanks who have LOLed through Outlands. That in an of itself is not a terrible thing–every one of us gets a rude awakening now and again and have to tighten up your skills (see: me, tanking heroics on my warrior). I love helping people. If you’re clueless but nice, I’ll do everything I can to make your life easier. But so many of these fresh into Northrend tanks are outwardly hostile for reasons that escape me.

This game is an MMO. That means there’s OTHER PEOPLE playing with you. That means that maybe, maybe, you should extend some small amount of effort in playing with the OTHER PEOPLE so that you don’t make the entire experience SUCK. Why the fuck should you need a GUIDE to tell you that you should not pull while your healer is drinking? Or that if you die when you pull two groups, you should only pull one? Common sense, anybody? Consideration? Situational awareness? Bueller?

How about not doing a job you don’t have adequete gear for? I leveled as a tank, on multiple toons. One of them even treated it as her secondary spec (see: druid). There is tanking gear out there. There are greens of the Champion. There is, in other words, no real excuse for being a paladin and tanking with SP leather. AND pulling while I’m drinking. AND standing in the bosses Casting of Supreme Ouch. I’ve tanked UK when undergeared, it was no fucking joke when Wrath came out and is probably no fucking joke even now.

Go suck it up in the DPS queue until you have the gear, okay? Skill comes with practice, but it’s much easier to learn when you’re not at high risk of dying. Tanking is gear dependent. Please stop trying to escape this fact at the cost of others. Or in the very least…say something in the start and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be surprised.

I tank on 4 different toons for two reasons. Well, I do kind of enjoy tanking as well, but that’s beside the point.

1) Faster queues. Even a healer has to wait one or two WHOLE MINUTES for a group. What the fuck.
2) OH MY GOD, LOWBIE TANKS SO OFTEN SUCK.

By “suck” I don’t mean just generally fail at getting aggro. I mean suck as in not even TRYING to have decent gear. And by decent mear I mean “things even remotely suited for tanking”.

If you are a paladin and your gear consists of ungemmed Kara tanking epics, 1 random Kara epic DPS belt, and half SPELL POWER GEAR, some of which is LEATHER, then FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY ARE YOU QUEUING AS A TANK.

NO. BAD PALADIN.

We wiped on the last boss of Utgarde Keep, twice, because there was no way I could pour my whole mana bar into him and keep everyone else alive at the same time. I have never mashed all my buttons so hard so fast in my entire tree life. Only to die.

I also had a DK in partial SP plate (WHY). I just…I…what is this I don’t even.

Since I run into many more bad tanks than bad healers, back to bear-LFDing I go.

And theoretically, on rare occasions, we also have an @Orithea! On less rare and more wordy occasions, we also have a James. Who does not have a Twitter because he is fail? Anyway, there had to be some bubbles in this blog somewhere.